Schwantz Drinking Schwantz Dreaming

The Entrance of the Gadfly

Professor Schwantz samples and later puts paid to a bottle of very questionable poitín laid down under the turf lumps in the fuel shed last winter by myself to be used in case of emergency as a possible rat deterrent. It in no way deters him and he soon sinks softly and for once utterly silently (silence with no sort of utterance is a miracle in the case of Schwantz) into the soft plenitude of my padded writing chair. He now slowly flows out in all directions at once like spilt pancake mix on a tabletop as he travels to that ethereal ‘other place’ we visit when putting pen to paper or brush to canvas. Along with the poitín, and according to his own characteristic predilections, he is subsumed into the bravado and impertinence of a gadfly-in-love and dreams a dream of implausible omnipotence and rattling good yarn-ness.

You will note, reader, gentle or otherwise, that this is a blog, and in a blog everything is backwards. That is to say today’s instalment will be yesterday’s tomorrow and tomorrow’s will be today’s when the present one is yesterday’s. This should help you understand what is unfolding but it is only a part of the paradox of the space-time-continuum and really nothing at all to do with me.

First Appearance of the Gadfly

At that moment there was a small commotion in an adjoining clump of reeds. A gaudy personage poked his head into sight. He seemed not to notice the presence of the Spider and with bravura addressed himself to the Fly.
-Madam, he said, inclining his head in a most genteel manner, -I knew you would be here.
He raised his gaze and turning his eyes like a heliotrope in her direction, winked salaciously through a thousand lenses.
-Well, thought the Fly, -who is this then?
-I, said the newcomer, as if reading her thoughts, -am the Gadfly.
And emerging from the rush stalks he bowed again, this time a full and aristocratic bending from the waist, and smiled condescendingly as if bestowing his flattery upon the whole forest.

The Fly noticed that he was certainly beautiful to behold. He smiled out from a strong moustachioed visage and wore a gleaming black neckerchief studded with what appeared to be diamond pins. Below this his wrestler’s chest was encased in a turquoise breastplate from which dangled an extraordinary array of brightly coloured ribbons and bronze campaign medals. Fine veined wings of opal hue and iridescent gauze and a blue flashing cloak which winked and shimmered like a lighthouse in the shadows of the rush bed completed this first, and, in her opinion, very favourable impression.

It seemed to the Fly that the sun was suddenly brighter, the air sweeter and the musty woodland smells more enticing than they had ever been before.

The Spider, sitting passively in his silken web, grimaced.
-There is not much to him at all, he muttered.
-All is show and no meat. Nothing to quench the hunger of the body and no sustenance for the soul. He is a flyboy pretty thing, all armour and certificates. There is no juice in this one, and no broth in his bones. He might as well be fish food for all I care.

But the Gadfly had a trumpet to blow and it was soon clear that it was his own.
-Madam, he began, -allow me to introduce myself, for I am no lowborn dung heap botfly. His eyes glittered with the sharp danger of a handful of broken glass.
-They call me the Tormenter. I am of Noble and Ancient Race. My ancestors caused dinosaurs in the rampant fern forests of aeons past to trumpet despairingly and lash their tails with brute fury against their very own flanks until they dripped red with blood.
-Me oh my, gasped the Fly. The Gadfly continued.
-I myself, as infant, stampeded horses by the herd. I have caused turf cutters to go mad and leap to their doom in bottomless bog holes. I have upturned rich picnic parties and driven even genteel ladies to tear off their undergarments in frenetic and panic stricken scratching.

By now the Gadfly had risen from his reed stalk and hovering in the air before them with the assurance of an operatic tenor delivering his seventh encore of the evening was clearly enjoying the wrapt attention of the whole Universe and perhaps other and parallel worlds far beyond that.
-I have caused proud generals on the reviewing stand to slap their own faces in the very presence of a hundred thousand disciplined soldiers under their command. Wherever I go I panic the elephant and stampede the rhinoceros and torment the crocodile until they jump through the forest like young frightened gazelles and soar into the air in their torment as do the flying fish of the far and unvisited tropics. Even the pike sheathes its razor teeth and hides its stern eye beneath the safe skin of the water when I come visiting its pool to drink!

During all this performance the Fly remained spellbound; all thought of philosophy and arachnid wisdom and witty conversation vanished from her thoughts.
-I wouldn’t mind having his maggots, she thought. –he looks mighty enough to breed a plague of locusts.

The Fly by now was so captivated by the display being enacted for her benefit that she failed to notice what was happening behind her in the silver web.
(To be continued and probably to be preceded.)


I catch up with Monday Morning


I need a hoist today to raise me from the bed. I grip the iron bedhead and heave. Cold! Cold iron! Cold tiles beneath my feet! Hard to get blood out of my fingers for the test. Stone fingers of a statue. And tired! Tired! Tired! Criss-crossing the bog all night and the moor and mountain. Like King Wenceslas. But a successful day for the painting sales. Me, drained as a well-diked field. And Rain! Rain! Rain! The washing put out two days ago to dry is washed again and again and again, drooping heavy into the lawn which I had managed to cut wet that day during an impromptu sun storm. The red sheets flap disheartened and no bull comes. Not even the donkeys, bedraggled in the barn.

I pull my dressing gown on and tap the keyboard as I pass towards the kitchen. But no broadband comes. Broadband is off. There must be water in the works or cyber pirates. Suddenly the plank wobbles beneath my feet. I am to be cut loose. The bee-buzz of voices around the world that cocoons my first awakening is abruptly silenced. There is nothing in the house now to accompany last night’s ragged dream scraps. Only shreds of distant bird song in the garden and the dripping of the universe against the bland artificiality of the running bath.

I am days behind in my blog. But I have had sales at last and I do have a new commission. Back to the studio? Write first and then paint? My driving arms ache and my eyes weep bleary from the night roads over the bogs. Better to have too much to do than too little! In the company of young men I confirm to myself I am no longer of that generation. The wheel has turned. The great boulder has moved and settled deeper into the ground. But a kind of fitness flows in me. Success is a tonic it seems. I could be thirty. A slow thirty however. But not wiser, I think.

It seems odd, without broadband. Like a death or a separation. I am surprised! It is as though a casual lover grew into a friend unexpectedly and then just as unexpectedly vanished. No note. Only an empty space. There is a startled feeling of loss. Having recorked the bottle and flushed away the rizlas and eschewed the gurus it appears I am addicted once again.

A Spit and a Handshake

But no blog for a few days. Between bailing out my attic and rowing around the potato patch looking for the start of the concrete path, and diving down to where the flower beds used to be to see if there is any truth in the pots-of-gold-and-rainbows story (my garden is overwhelmed by rainbows and now by rainbow trout as well), I have been frequently away on mercantile peregrinations.

I have crossed high ground unflooded for the moment, high bogs and valleys and the sheep grazed rhododendron forests of Erris in search of lawyers to buy my paintings. They are the only people whose heads are still above water. No contracts, for my stars warn me against legal entanglements. Just a simple promise to pay down the line is enough. Through the nose would be better but we are in the midst of recession and if I had gills I could dive down-Derry-down to the real world and see if that story is true. Since I do not have gills, not even a snorkel, I have to take a lawyer’s word for it.

No contracts, but a spit and a handshake will do. If swine flu is not a topic to bring a man out in porous nocturnal emissions (which it is) then this is a time-honoured Hibernian deal-sealer. I am happy to use it as long as it is my spit and his handshake. I am become Gombeen Man and once a name is written in my little Book of Debitors the debt will incubate snugly as a Favour Rendered to the point where soon I might consider running for Political Office myself. For larger paintings, a quick cut with a penknife in the palm of the hand can suffice but since blood swapping outside closed family groups can cause feuding or even death; I prefer gob.

As for rationing and the attendant descent into the lower circles of the 1950s, the Opposition (whoever it may be) is adamant that this retro-measure is the future if the present government (whoever it may be) continues at the helm. Helm? I hear most of the important decisions are taken in that part of the ship of state known as the head where, if not entrails then at least other steaming and recently generated fecalities are readily available for the national augurs’ ponderation so that they can make their usual coprophilic predictions. So says Schwantz anyway.

And as for spitting, though now banned in most of the civilised world apart from China, the practice in commercial scenarios is closer to us than we imagine already. When I enter posh emporiums in The Big City in my Bog Garb of caipín and Wellington Boots I already discern in the attendants Ur-frigid pronouncement ‘Can I help You Sir’ the underlocution ‘Pig-brained filth, I spit in your eye!’ Not much distance from eye to hand. (That is the shoplifter’s motto, by the way.). It is all part of the same incomprehensible paradox forced upon us by the use of language and the droolings of the left hand side of the brain. More of this later. Ad infinitum. Ad nauseam. Ad Hoc.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I have been away.

Kippah for breakfast: You’ve had your chips

The sun the sun but cold cold cold. Like a cancer scalpel righteous and without heart watching dispassionate the lighted grass, turning the lead field to gold for how long five minutes or half a day, eternity really, as emails light on me like butterflies with tales of sadness joy tragedy and hope. Sun King, how long the benign grace of thy levee until it cools? I drove my Chevy. And the boon will be reversed. My hollowness in the cold morning resounds like a drum. The tea and the toast and the rhubarb jam do nothing and the concrete path feels hard and dry and gritty under my clogs. Messages of cancers messages of loneliness. Messages of probings into the dark chambers of unseen worlds and gropings for hope. Messages of forced play with children and triste trysts with desperate strangers pass through my head rustling like white moths. But my candle is cold and hardened as old heart muscle, the wax unmelted, the wick black but unburned. Nothing engages in this kind of sunlight; neither cruelty nor compassion. No blistering flame. No far-seeing light. I am far far far from it all. The wailing wall sweeps across my horizon daubed with black suited men in ringlets and diamond dealer hats and I have a cardboard yarmulke false as the pommes-frites platter covering my pate. Overhead the distant whine of an armed mirage. I was here in Safed for flying rabbis. I found only cedars and war planes. Better the flying rabbits of the Bog.

The wet pulls back in a receding tide gone out for a while now but the cold comes in riding the sunlight like winter ice around a pond. I have stones for organs and a drum for my heart, It beats, but without comfort.

The world was fuller when it was full of water. The rain pulled back like the curtain on a stage, revealing cold light, cold eyes watching, and every move pre-planned. The beans grow now, nutritious and slow. The courgette leaves rise like dry umbrellas simulating green cumulonimbus un-nimbly rising, waiting for rain. Flicker of wax-yellow blooms, still restrained, like the still garden.

They are earthbound. And the air tickles but does not delight them with its chill. No explosion of summer. Summer fizzles like a slow fuse, but the powder is damp. September walks past in dry moccasins imparting a shiver and the smell of winter. Leaves fall and crack underfoot. I feel not tired but cruel. And words like bullets click into the chamber and are discharged dropping their empty cases with a clatter on the hard ground, evidence but not of truth.

Everything is Itself or its Opposite or a Part of a Camel

Not ready yet! Not ready yet! The tatters of a dream in gold and silvered shards collapse around me. They fall off tingling, tinkling in ghostly tintinnabulations. The outside rain drips off garden chimes and convolvulus with its own clinking sucking sound, a kind of suppressed sobbing. Last night slips to the floor in a heap of fallen bedclothes. Pools of creamed light gather around the cast off covers, silently curdling.

Outside there is sun today. A weird light flickers over the bog. Whose morning? Is it now or then? Sunflowers of light flap against the curtains and a green rustling wakefulneess begins to fill my bedroom.

Yesterday Schwantz was here. I did not light the fire. A turf fire invites intimacy and confidences. I am in two minds about Schwantz. He is a charlatan. In the Spanish sense utterly for his monologues are endless. And probably in the English sense too, for his very plausibility invites disbelief. In his roughness he is too smooth to be taken seriously. I trust the donkeys more. They have clean souls, in spite of their bad behaviour around food. At least they show what they want. Schwantz always presents himself like a crossword puzzle. He is too much of an effort to do, and full of trick questions. And in the end, what is the point anyway?

He stood first in the doorway wrapped in black oilskins dripping like a newly surfaced walrus while the gale and the wind roared behind him in the garden as if to emphasise his gross importance. I faced him in my pink dressing gown and clogs, still muddy and wet from the concrete path and my first dip into the morning oxygen, tea mug steaming.
- -You should shoot those greenfinches! he said, starting up. - Get a slug gun! Bad as magpies! Like a load of immigrants! Hang them up as a warning to the others.
I thought of all the immigrants living on the bog. Me. Him. That was about the sum of it. Enough hang-ups between us though. Perhaps we would be a good warning to others, if anyone knew. But even if they knew, would they understand? I grew courgettes the last time the sun passed this way and presented them to all my neighbours with a simple recipe. -Very nice, they said. -But I wouldn’t put them on my shopping list. I suppose there is a lot to be said for cabbage and bacon. It makes you feel as if the world does not need to spin. Like the lilies of the field.
-Tea? I offered.
He pushed into the parlour in affirmation and slumped his dripping bulk into an armchair in front of the empty grate. I would have preferred the kitchen. It is more of a place for boots and prejudice. Flags and bare wood. Better suited than a Persian Carpet. Although once, fifty years ago, on the road between Tabriz and Teheran I observed new hand woven carpets spread out in the middle of the road to age under the wheels of passing traffic. Perhaps he was doing me a favour.
- -Not a bad day after all, he said, taking a deep breath. Water pooled from his boots and trickled into the ashes around the hearthstone. I thought of the fat black leech I had discovered on the bóithrín two days before.

“Who is that black man moving
like an acquired target
in the heart of Ballyhaunis?
A noonday shadow
standing up
to make itself invisible.”

Professor Schwantz was talking.
-The problem with immigrants is that they are human beings. I have noticed that this is often a characteristic of foreigners, unless they have first been legislated against. Difference is easy to deal with. It is Sameness that causes the difficulties. Many thinking people in the past, even up until my early childhood and beyond if you count the Balkans and the Rub’ al Khali did not feel that there was any problem here at all. Difference was their currency for in a dualistic world everything is itself or its opposite or a part of a camel. This is something that can be reckoned on the fingers of half a hand holding the thumb and two fingers in reserve for other tasks and indeed it creates a powerful legal precedent. After all Duality has been around ever since the left hand side of the brain realised it had and is the upper hand. The solution to this conundrum (no pun included today) is Them and Us and makes a perfectly balanced equation: [Them never equals Us]. Us gets the directorship. Them goes to the salt mines. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Arrival of the Professor

Rain rain rain on the window pane!
Through the computer threads streak out linking me to the wide wide world which has form for me and voice but no blood and thunder. I wonder about narrative and how to string these thoughts together into pattern and form. Is the narrative the weather day by day and this cocktail of mood and cloud and sunshine continuing and changing but always moving in one direction: my Narrative? Is it the buckled belt of the concrete path and the cloak of the bóithrín and the steel structure of memory? Or is it nothing but a vague wandering aimlessly through feelings and time and space, signifying, as the bard and many others have said, absolutely nothing?

Hard to decide in the first moments of consciousness as I am once more born and waking to another day. One more anyway! At least one more! Tea! Tea! Tea! I scatter pills into my mouth like peanuts, little tacks holding my life together. We plough the field and scatter the good seed on the land but it is fed and watered…. But then, what is the difference between the pills the doctor prescribes and the food I put into my mouth when I am eating with care and conscientiousness and with the intent of staying alive, perhaps even a bit past my allotted time. Who organises the allotment, after all?! We plough the fields….. Of course then there is the weeding!

Tea tea tea and toast. Whatever the weather I shall now slice off that small portion of the bog that is mine and place my footprints on its face and breath the outside air and walk through the Jerusalem Artichokes to my green hill not far away without a city wall but with lots and lots of stone ditches and the fanfare of hoarse horsy hosts hurrah! Now give me the tea!!

I have fed the birds again, filled the new and shiny feeder to the brim. No peanuts available at the Co-op. I get a big sack (I can hardly lift it!) of small bird seed for small birds. Half of it immediately falls through the meshes and feeds the field mouse. They were made for peanuts. At least she won’t have to climb the pole into visibility. The feral cats (for I have met them in the bóithrín lately and got their number) will be happy, should they deign to return. They are probably prowling the environs of a richer household by now. And anyway they don’t like the rain.

Rain! Rain! Rain! Rain! Never seems to stop. The Mayo monsoon, becoming endemic, like bog-mosquitoes. August. Holiday month. Karma for badly brought up kids. Or badly bringing up parents. It must be nice at Enniscrone today, the wind whistling through the reeds and fescue grass, the sand fixed and battened down by the downpour. No whirling into your eyes. Reek of seaweed, kelp and salt and dead crabs. Old razor shells and clams, or whatever they are, and the sandpipers marching up and down, learning to goosestep for when they go abroad. Or is this abroad? Everything is topsy-turvy these days. Nothing new. The world turned upside down again. As it always was!

Rain! Rain!. Amazed the birds put up with it. But they are out there quarrelling as usual, now they have something to quarrel about. I hate the greenfinches with their hooked beaks and avaricious eyes. They are a good proof for where Tyrannosaurus Rex went when he was offered the witness protection programme after fingering the Space Invaders. Brute force when they can’t get their own way. Where do they come from? They go back sometimes. Not for long enough. Take what they can and go and come back for more. Carpetbaggers. I favour the home bred: robin and the wren, in spite of its short fuse, and the dunnock. No trouble. Almost pets. And Mister Peepsie the chaffinch. Knows enough to ask for his breakfast. Can’t call it singing for his supper. More like an annoyed glottal tick. He has a growth like a reed blossom on his leg. Like his father. Runs in the family. His grandfather learned to bump the kitchen window and get seeds on the sill. Gave him an advantage over the others. How long do they live? Someone told me three years. Their day must be pretty intense then. Lots of immigrants here. Not real asylum seekers. They go and come. Earn here, take it all home to wherever, Africa, who knows, and come back for more. No regulations.

Rain! Rain! Rain!. Hard now. Like lead shot. The deck round the studio filling up like a grey lake. I’d better put newspapers down inside. The Bog wants to wipe everything out. Smooth it down and turn it into turf and grow over it nice and neat. Turn us all into bog mummies. Then we can be dug up in a thousand years and put in a state-sponsored museum and called heritage. Make money for somebody.

Rap at the door. Louder than the rain. Using the brass harp door-knocker. Brassy and peremptory. Un-Irish. Do I want company. YesNoYesNo Who is it? I hide behind the door frame and peer through the bathroom glass.

It’s Schwantz. Professor Schwantz. Schwantz the Professor. Not from here. Not from Curryaun certainly. Not from Ireland. Another continental blow-in that stuck to the Mayo cloth like a burr and hasn’t the will to pull himself loose and get a real life in a real place. A gabber. A real gab-man. A gab-gubbe. Never stops talking. I wonder about letting him in. Once he opens his mouth he never stops. He stops but his mouth doesn’t. Loose-hinged. All flaps open. All stops out. Machine gun palatals. Motorised labials. Epiglottis can’t keep still. Glottolalia. E' glottolalia magistralis (dicesi glottolalia lo stato in cui il santo o il mistico prestano il proprio apparato vocale alla divinità che parla per bocca .... Glossolalia maybe. Glossodoolalia. I do not think he talks in tongues, only in the tongue of Saint Schwantz himself. No need for a connection with God, for he is Him. Still I appreciate the gallon of poitín he brought me a couple of years ago. Or I would if I dared to drink it. I took a small sip once. The next day I was down with a hallucinatory kidney infection. It might have been a coincidence, of course. If one is spiritually impoverished enough to believe in coincidences, that is. I may well be of that category, but I prefer not to take chances, at this tender extremity of life. I serve it to visiting foreigners at the studio only and they feel well-Irished.

Well, I suppose I need a break.

Schwantz the Professor. Professor Schwantz. Don’t know Professor of What? Punch and Judy most likely. European sort. University of Gothenburg he says. But he can’t speak Swedish, for I tried him. Says it was a long while ago and I did not press the point. I said it was a quotation from Hafez, merely, and in the original Farsi, and that I was simply summing up the futility of living in memory and the draughty halls of the past, and who cares about Gothenburg now anyway, whatever it might have meant to us both at the time, which in my case was not much. He agreed. Or at least he let it pass without further elaboration.

Everything is a long while ago now. Stinking old-age. Age, age where is thy stink, death where is thy what? Or was it the grave?
Anyway, he blew in there too from somewhere faraway else, who knows what place? Sort of Central European I would guess from the rich cultural baggage he carries about with him and shares lavishly. Too rich for the bog, but I am thankful for small mercies. He is after all a real person and could never be confused with a computer monitor. A monitor lizard, perhaps.

Reckons he knew me from then. Might have. I don’t remember those years. Pripps Number Three.

Parallelograms

That was a cold cold cold morning, that day. Tractors passed early: green for Michael, orange for Sam, blue for Tom D, each with its own throaty cough. So cold the hands of autumn under my dressing gown. I had left my big coat in the car ready for the viewing and the walk to the church. Rain was predicted. And the eternal wind.
I must air my fusty funeral suit with the button up waistcoat and go out and blow the cobwebs from my head along the concrete path. I shall follow the path into security. Perhaps I should extend it? All the way up the meadow, maybe to the hawthorn enclosure. Perhaps even beyond those magic protectors. Over the bóithrín. Out across the commonage. Up past Martin’s pines and their dark pine martins’ lairs. Over the bog and away from the misty holes where the bogmen fester out the centuries. Even further out, far and away to hot and hotter places. Keep it going. Into the broiling Chaco, land of wild pigs and serpents. Through the sizzling streets of Concepción littered with old tanks and steam trains. Down Asunción’s cobbled lanes shaded with pink and blue lapacha, strange giants whose seeds resemble castanets and whose husks crack like rifle shots on the hottest days. Or even further. To the terra incognita of my unexamined youth. My own no-man’s-land. I can speak the lingo now.

June 1st 1966
At the Bottom of the Garden, Calle San José 32, Calella, Spain.

I ought to call this an interim report; it is so long since I wrote anything. Time goes quickly here. During the month I have kept up my routine, practicing two hours every morning at the bottom of the garden and then normally an hour or so in my room in the evening by candlelight with Vera lying in bed reading or listening. The garden is ideal for practicing, with its high walls that shut out the world. I’m screened from the house by a thick flowering shrub all covered with pink blooms, and by the tangerine tree. I hadn’t seen a tangerine tree before. They are very closely branched. It makes a good screen. I sit in a kind of summerhouse. The end of the garden, which is paved except for the flowerbeds, is roofed over, high, like a kind of stable. The overflow from the water tanks runs out in a terracotta fountain with cherubs and moss. There’s a large pond-like tank under it where they keep the milk and the cakes, full of bug-infested water. It’s very secure and isolated, except when Mr or Mrs B comes down to collect a bottle, or leave one in the tank. I’ve learned a lot of songs: the whole of the Clancy Brothers songbook.
It’s raining now, after lunch. The thrushes are noisy and radios are playing in the house next door and someone is hammering. They are always building here. There was thunder a while ago. Now just the soft rain pattering on the leaves. Clouds of swallows above the house.

That was a faraway place, off there, forty and more years ago, at Bobby’s Bar on Franco’s Costa Brava between Barcelona and the bare and tragic hills that overlooked the ocean. The valleys were full of paths and the paths full of dust, untrodden, like old abandoned houses. The trees stood always motionless as old people at a funeral. They moved me often enough as I walked through the scattered ruins they observed, never knowing why I felt so sad or what might once have happened there.

So very far away, on the sharp edge of youth, with childish things put behind me by default and the rest of life like a dark impenetrable thicket barring my path. It is clear now that I had defaulted somewhere along the way and had not picked up all the essential equipment I was to need to finish my journey in a satisfactory manner. Unless, that is, it was the journey that mattered, and not even the Devil cared where I ended up afterwards.
I learned my first trade there, practicing my guitar by the terracotta fountain under the tangerine tree and beside what turned out, when it burst one day into amazing Martian Invader Technicolor bloom, to be a pomegranate bush, cruel, thorned and beautiful.

This was a place I had no need to know again, although the memories linger like Saturday night perfume during Sunday morning prayers. I retained for later use the pomegranate bush’s safe isolation of being, penetrated only by a consciousness of lizards and locusts and the meaningless poetry of rain.

This morning Pam came in with an uneven drizzle of tears and told us that Audrey whom I’d met a couple of times had been killed this morning. It was on the road from Pineda. She and a lorry, the car demolished. I remember what they said about her. Suicidal, whatever that really means. She talked and thought and painted and was lousing up her life. I am not touched. I did not really know her. I do not know yet what lousing up a life means. And death is just a word. I have never seen a corpse or even loved anyone who became one. I’ve never even loved anyone. I don’t know what people mean when they talk about their feelings. The sound of the rain is nice. And I am alone, also nice. Lunch was good: stew with beef and kidneys in it, and strawberries after. Vera is kind today. I’m shirking painting the new bar. So I’m quite content. Listening to the rain.

I stand by the open coffin with the bitter-sweet taste of tea and toast and rhubarb jam in my mouth. I noticed mould in the jam jar this morning. I had to scrape it off. It is a shock to see you now, old neighbour! You are shrunk to nothing shrouded in silk ruffs and painted like a little doll; a model man made of marzipan in a confectioner’s shop window. You are not here. You are gone. A line of sombre lads, the immaculate males of the family, salute your journey with a volley of handshakes but you have already gone. The people say you were a model man. Older women grey-haired in black dresses with silver brooches mourn you in a sad line. Younger women sit and I am sorry for their trouble again and again and again as I review the family. It is a quick business. I am soon out in the sunshine and the rain.

Now the rain is much harder and the ground has begun to smell earthy and wet. The butcher’s fridge next door is humming away. I suppose I can hear the sea somewhere in the background, apart from the thunder, but it’s difficult to tell, there are so many other sounds; all distant behind the rain; indefinite places, but distant.

Calella is utterly boring and only practice, reading and long walks with Vera up into the hills make things bearable. I cannot converse with the B’s. We live in different realities. Perhaps mine is an illusion, though it seems true enough to me. Martin is very funny. The parents squabble and quarrel at night in the room next door. The bar isn’t yet open so I have no work and am kept but not paid. I haven’t sung since The Gloucester in South Kensington. The tour guides who frequent the house do not help to liven things up much. Everyone sits around talking about food mainly or lawyers. I act the buffoon usually which is the only way I can place myself comfortably. Otherwise I might just as well not be in the room. Nobody talks about REAL things. There is no common ground when we are assembled. Conversation is about food and diseases. I am still without a point of view that I can write down. Mainly I am me, just shut away, and that is that. And the rain falls with such a pleasant sound and the leaves are very, very green this afternoon.

We went out last night. There was a power failure and we sat around in candlelight eating fried eggs. Then Martin wanted to go out for a coffee. I don’t like these bars and coffee joints. The peasants, German and Spanish, laugh and point at my beard. Some hysterical woman pulled it a few nights ago. I settled with Mathew for him to buy us strawberries and cream. Then we went and borrowed 40 pesetas from Martin and went to Kiki’s bar and met Bob and borrowed 100 pesetas. Got a little bit drunk and touchy and quarrelled with Vera and went home and quarrelled some more and went to sleep and woke up and made it up. She is nice to me today. So be it, this day of rain and death and caring very much about everything somewhere deep down underneath and lost.

The garden has two kinds of lizards and now and then a great three inch grasshopper.

A Late Death

I have heard of your late death. Let me think about it. This is not news to be entertained quickly. Too near the knuckle. Too far from the cold head. There will be a removal soon and a burial hard on it. I will come to them when you do.

I shall walk the long maze now and take my afternoon constitutional along the magic bóithrín where I have walked for seven years. I shall meditate, mostly on myself, for Death makes Siamese Twins of everyone. This maze is a place of ivy and rowan and other plants that transgress the fixed boundaries of logic, flowering here with enchantment but rooting on the other side, channels of draíocht and sorcery. Once there were oaks here. Those sacred groves were cut down long ago and sent in chains to hold up the roofs of foreign churches. It is said that our ancestors belonged to both sides.

After the news reached me the weather took a strange course and in a flash the cold drizzle changed to hot sunlight and all around me yellow flowers burst out golden and hopeful. The fallacy is a pathetic one I know but I cannot help believing in it. The air here now smells sweet and of blackberries. The wind sings in the telegraph wires and has stopped its miserable keening. The sun bounces back from the road, hot on ankles, hot on hands, quite amiable.

It is seven years today since I arrived and found the last four-leafed clover in a fifty year chain of finds growing here between the wheel tracks. I have never found one since. Perhaps the last one marked a journey completed. Over these years every cell in my old body has been exchanged for a new green one. Here I am older but in a brand-new body walking the same bóithrín. In another seven years I shall be the same age as you were yesterday, my late neighbour. The year is shrinking. The hawthorn berries are already reddening. They look like the bowls of small polished briar pipes set among thorns. Summer slides in imperceptible slippage towards the fall, and the year is smouldering away.

A large brown dragonfly stops before me treading air. Does it know I’m here? The Ryan jet, the one with the everlasting prow, passes overhead. Heaven's trumpets resound in the blue air. It is a vast blue canopy now, not just enough to make a sailor a pair of trousers! It has become suddenly big enough to be a complete sail; enough to pull the whole island off to somewhere else far away over the ocean.

Out of the ruined houses nettles leap barking like wolves, defensive and territorial, full of contained aggression. The ash trees sigh and whisper quietly; new-comers they, a green roof rising from the roofless parlour. People lived here and left the year I was born. They took their livestock and their roof with them. The ash trees are too young to remember. They know nothing of Death yet. They could ask the fuchsias. They know.

The Concrete Path: Death and Convalescence

This morning my neighbour died but I do not know this yet. It is a cold bleak drizzly day with a miserable wind complaining out of the north-east. I had slept like a piece of lead piping dropped down a well and am compos mentis again it seems and convalesced enough to work at something or other, although it does not seem important what. I take this indifference as a warning but ignore it anyway. Two friends text me and tell me their cancer operations are done. I shiver. It looks cold out there in the garden. I put on a heavy leather Liverpool pea jacket over my dressing gown and grope for the concrete path, holding my tea mug to my cheek like a plague posy. The shame of my hypochondria accompanies me in reproachful silence through the back door.

But now the concrete path takes over and leads me with the firm guidance of an in-house nurse who is well-used to incontinent nincompoops and dodderers. We walk together between bedraggled tiger lilies reduced to toothless cats by the night wind and here and there step over the collapsed wreckage of green hollyhock towers. The wind tries to get inside my coat like a homeless ocelot, pleading and threatening by turns. I pull leather around me, feeling the crust of yesterday’s influenza in my eyes, still in my sinuses today, prickly, and myself prickly too and irritable with the vile morning and the vile weather. I let the wind slide by me like a beggar, ignored. I refuse to meet the eyes of poverty. Let the poor blow off somewhere else to make bad weather and beg for love and sunshine.

How is it that June was flaming Mediterranean but that for all the rest of the past two years I have been expecting Noah to come trundling over the horizon with his ark on a donkey cart looking for the inland sea of Erin as his starting point for a biblical regatta? Even the Bog Lakes on top are sprouting mermaids!

My courgettes are scarcely able to slide themselves out of the flower’s womb before they begin to rot. Only grass and lettuce thrive as a breakfast for Beast and Man. I shall be a Beast Man if I sink any deeper into this bog.

What would it be like to live where, instead of the cow with the crumpled horn that now stares me down over the ivy ditch like an angry hag, it was strong black garbed women carrying wicker baskets of fresh loaves across a sunlit square that greeted my eyes in the morning, and the smell of coffee and peaches and jasmine on old old walls. And instead of the basilisk glare of the donkeys braying for attention I could be greeted by the sound of bells from a Catalan basilica or a stolen Moorish palace ringing across my breakfast table, as I drank sweet Arab coffee and dunked my croissant, studying the architecture of passing women and beautiful buildings, as I once did 40 years ago but now with the leisurely appreciation of experience and not the panting hunger of youth.

You read this blog and comment from far away places, warm places, places where the stones are worked with artifice into cathedrals and living tombs and great statues and delicate carvings and majestic paved squares where well-heeled crowds surge back and forth to the wine dark tide-pull of a fermenting civilisation. You comment about my green wet land of pre-history. Well, it remains pre-history still for nothing moves here but cattle and the stealthy land raids of herdsmen plotting in their outhouses how to filch with the speed of a slug another inch of bogland from their neighbours. And the stealthily abrasive grindstone of the weather and inherited memory glaciate the landscape down to uneventful grass and bog and farmer’s gossip. In the end handfuls of sand. But each grain cunningly etched of course.

You would like to come here? From the snail-decked land of Gaudi and the pillared Toledo halls and the Alhambra echoing with the wisdom of long-banished philosophers, and thinkers beaten to death by the heavy crucifix and burned, and scent of orange blossom and jasmine and olive, and all things moving and alive, and terrible and delightful, your hot-blood paradox, land of Goya, land of Velasquez, land of Franco and the Inquisition, Torquemada and oranges. The swallows visit you there. Why do they return to scrag and reed beds and a mouthful of midges? This is not an inspiring morning. Where on the bog this morning is the rosy warmth of global warming? The hot breath of a dawn that replaces bog orchid with amaryllis and finger sized tulips and shakes the bog flats into a counterpane of embroidered floral fantasy? You want to come to Sligo?

The concrete path takes me on past the collapse of summer to the potato patch. They wave their yellow and green and black flags at me and wink their pretty pratified petals, jumping around in the wind like football supporters, some black-faced and vomiting, some aren’t-you- the- muscley-A-Alpha-male, some supremely and quietly proud and silent ! Big unblighted roosters! What will happen if I do not harvest them? Will they tuck themselves up and wait till next year and rise again, hale and hearty, or come creeping in stinking of scab and the old disease, the bog-family inheritance? Does the hand of God reach out to the immigrant failure with even handed compassion? Or should Walter have left them to the Indians in the New World?

The concrete path rocks slightly beneath my feet on its uncertain future. In the Stolen Field the cow with the crumpled horn notices the sudden clamour my passing produces in her world, and approaches the ditch for a hobnob. She has waited long. Is this what she was waiting for? A Messiah has come? Her head over the wall, her huge bulk rises like a whale from the ocean of sour weeds that is her world enclosure.

She fixes me with her eye, large, cold, disappointed, enquiring, like a jaundiced judge too long on the bench. I speak to her, but there is no need for words. Beside the cattle crush her calf waits like an auctioneer, curious, already the small man, bullish and perfect, tall as the old grass. They belong to the Stolen World. I am on a different side of the ditch.

Rain beats suddenly across my face, like a duellers slap. The donkeys, back by the house, have seen me. They bray bread and the bog arena echoes mournfully with their castrated sadness like a Jumbo Jet full of pilgrims landing for Knock Shrine.

I turn. Goodbye cow, somebody else’s. Goodbye Stolen Field. Somebody else’s. Goodbye the sun drenched squares of Spain and the ambulatory shapes of Spanish women. Somebody else’s. The concrete path mutters comfortingly. Don’t worry. Come along. We know where to go. Breakfast. Porridge. Grey like me and the Curryaun skies. Yum! This morning my neighbour died. But I do not know this yet.